Wednesday, April 5, 2017

UK: Two Systems of Justice

Tommy Robinson has not been
-- as Choudary was -- at the heart of a nexus of terrorists and
terrorist-supporters going back years. He has not been on friendly terms
with numerous people who have beheaded civilians and carried out
suicide bombings.

Robinson is in an exceptionally unfortunate position. He is not a
radical Islamist and nor is he from any discernible minority. He is a
white working-class man who, it appears, can thus not only be harassed
by certain authorities with impunity, but can find few if any defenders
of his rights among the vast panoply of people in our societies who are
only too keen to defend the rights of Islamists.

Civil liberties groups such as "Liberty," which are so stringent
in protecting the rights of Islamist groups such as "Cage," are silent
on the case of Tommy Robinson.

So farewell, then, Anjem Choudary. For two and half years at least.
On September 6, the radical cleric was sentenced by a British judge to
five and a half years in prison for encouraging people to join the
Islamic State. If he behaves himself in prison he could be out in half
that time, although whenever he emerges, it is unlikely that it will be
as a reformed character. But the law has taken its course and in a
rule-bound society has responded in the way that a rule-bound society
ought to behave -- by the following due process. So it is useful to
compare the experience of Anjem Choudary and the way in which the state
has responded to him with the way in which it has responded to another
person.

It is now seven years ago that a young British man from Luton going
by the name of Tommy Robinson formed the English Defence League (EDL).
He did so after he and other residents of the town of Luton were
appalled by a group of radical Muslims who protested a home-coming
parade for British troops. There is some interesting symmetry here in
that the Islamists present in Luton that day were members of Anjem
Choudary's group, al-Muhajiroun. Robinson and other residents of Luton
were not only taken aback by the behaviour of the radicals but by the
behaviour of the police who protected the radicals from the increasingly
angry local residents.

Whatever its legitimate grievances when it began, the EDL did
undoubtedly cause trouble. Protests often descended into thuggery,
partly because of some bad people attracted to it and partly because
"anti-fascist" counter-demonstrators often ensured that EDL protests
became violent by starting fights with them. But through most of the
time that Robinson led the EDL, there did appear to be -- confirmed by
third-party observers including independent journalists -- a sincere and
concerted effort to keep genuinely problematic elements out of the
organisation.

To those who said that Robinson and his friends had no
right to organise protests, there are two responses. The first is that
they had as much right to be there as anyone else. And second, that the
problems they were objecting to (hate-preachers, grooming-gangs and so
on) are real issues, which the state has increasingly realised are such
in the years that followed.

In 2013 Robinson left the group he started, and in the years since, has engaged in a range of activities, including authoring a book.
The book chronicles, among other things, a campaign by the state of
harassment, which began from the moment Robinson formed the EDL. His own
house and those of his nearest relatives were repeatedly raided by
police, and computers and other materials taken away for examination.
Any fair reading of the book -- whose details have again been broadly
confirmed by the few journalists who have been interested in the case --
suggests that there was a very clear and concerted effort to find
something -- anything -- on Robinson to get him locked up.

In the end the police did find something -- a mortgage fraud matter
-- for which Robinson was eventually tried and found guilty. In 2014, he
was imprisoned for eighteen months. Even after his release, the effort
to find something on Robinson continued. His movements were restricted.
His ability to speak and congregate was restricted. He was repeatedly
threatened with a return to prison for alleged breaches of bail
conditions. On one occasion, the nature of the charge was a brawl
Robinson had been involved with in prison, with a Muslim prisoner who
was allegedly in the act of attacking Robinson -- who had repeatedly
been placed in prison wings where there were large numbers of Muslim
inmates.
Since his release, as before, Robinson has been repeatedly assaulted
in the streets, including by Luton Muslims who have faced no subsequent
charges for their attacks, even when caught on camera. In February of
this year, he was hospitalised after being assaulted upon leaving a
nightclub in Essex.

Then, this August, as he and his family were attending a football game in Cambridge, they were once again the subject of police harassment.
While sitting in a pub with his wife and young children, they were
ejected from the pub by Cambridgeshire police. The police did this
despite the volunteered insistence of the management of the pub that the
family had been doing nothing wrong and were causing no trouble. Police
escorted Robinson and his family from the premises, and on the video
footage of the incident you can easily hear the sound of Robinson's
young children crying.

Unlike
Anjem Choudary (left), who was at the heart of a nexus of terrorists
and terrorist-supporters, Tommy Robinson (right) is a white
working-class man who can not only be harassed by police and other
authorities with impunity, but can find few if any defenders of his
rights among the vast panoply of people in our societies who are only
too keen to defend the rights of Islamists.

There will be those who think that such harassment of Robinson is
correct -- that in order to keep the peace it is necessary to keep an
eye on anybody who may have any effect to the contrary. But if that is
true, it is curious that such measures were not routinely used on Anjem
Choudary in all his years living freely in the community. It would be
interesting to know if there are any records of Choudary and his family
being harassed by police or removed from establishments while the
hate-preacher was on whatever down-time he used to have. Or whether the
British police ever routinely raid and search the houses of radical
Islamists in the hope of finding errors in their VAT returns and the
like.

But of course the very comparison is unfair and in many ways lazy,
because Tommy Robinson has not been -- as Choudary was -- at the heart
of a nexus of terrorists and terrorist-supporters going back years. He
has not been on friendly terms with numerous people who have beheaded
civilians and carried out suicide bombings.

There are not any occasions,
of which the author is aware, on which Robinson has called for violence
or the breaking of the law in the name of his political views. But in
the eyes of the law, much of the media and a certain number of people in
the country Robinson is in an exceptionally unfortunate position. He is
not a radical Islamist and nor is he from any discernible minority. He
is a white working-class man who, it appears, can thus not only be
harassed by certain authorities with impunity, but can find few if any
defenders of his rights among the vast panoply of people in our
societies who are only too keen to defend the rights of Islamists.

Civil liberties groups such as "Liberty'" which are so stringent in
protecting the rights of Islamist groups such as "Cage," are silent on
the case of Tommy Robinson. To consider why this is so is to see to the
heart of a problem that Britain has been going through in recent years
and which seems destined to continue for many years to come.

Douglas Murray, British author, commentator and public affairs analyst, is based in London, England.

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